Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong

by David Walsh

  Having gone over the edge with Halfords, he headed for the glamour of Belgium. He joined the SEFB outfit in 1988, noting that the team was sponsored by a bank. At that time, some people believed that cycling was clean and others believed that banks were a safe bet. Stephen believed both.

  He arrived in Liège to find that SEFB was a modest organisation and one of cycling’s wallflowers. The team struggled to get invited to decent races. Their directeur sportif was a character: Ferdinand Bracke, record holder for the hour in 1967, when he rode 48.093km in 60 minutes. Bracke was winner of the Tour of Spain in 1971, third in the Tour de France in 1968 and an old cyclist straight from central casting.

  Among Stephen’s teammates was a guy at the other end of the colour scale, a rider called Johan Bruyneel.

  Back then Bruyneel was a young professional and not yet a member of the boss class. He was riding for the first time in the peloton, having forged himself a good reputation on the Belgian amateur circuit. His teammates had high hopes for him.

  SEFB’s small budget and half-filled-out dance card meant that there was no doctor attached to the team, and in the matter of doping everybody was left to choose for himself. The soigneurs, of course, were more opinionated than taxi drivers.

  ‘One evening, I went to a soigneur’s room,’ Swart remembers. ‘All the products were there and the cyclists came to use them as they wanted. Another evening during the Tour de Suisse, we were sitting in a room and the soigneur came in with medications. Everyone helped themselves. The guys filled up these enormous syringes like you use for horses and shot up. I can tell you it wasn’t the first time. It was the culture.’

  Swart doesn’t know what he took. Because he was young, and he didn’t speak Flemish or French, he was left to himself. Afraid of medications and ignorant of their use, he generally avoided them. This was before the time of EPO, when people still cheated in minor chords. On his day, a clean rider could still catch a cheat.

  Swart had a natural exuberance in the saddle and when he was going well he loved his job. He finished 13th in the general classification of the Tour de Suisse. In the big mountain stages he was equal to the best. After the finish, he went back to Belgium by car with Bracke. They talked a lot.

  ‘Bracke was crazy; he couldn’t even drive normally. He was anxious over nothing. Something in him wasn’t working right. During this trip he told me about all the big projects he had for me.’

  The best laid plans, etc.

  The season ended prematurely for Swart, whose mother became seriously ill and died two weeks after his return to New Zealand. He took a job in a bicycle shop in Auckland, and slowly got back his desire to train. Around the end of the year, he decided to reboot his career in the United States, a place Swart appreciated because the races weren’t as hard there and the sport had a more hip, more middle-class, slightly alternative feel. The doping culture, which was everywhere in Europe, was practically non-existent.

  He began riding with a club in California and before long he had won enough races to come to the attention of Jim Ochowicz, directeur sportif with the Motorola team. Ochowicz offered him a place on the team and an opportunity to return to the European circuit.

  Swart couldn’t resist the temptation. He’d become bored with the States. He was riding with Coors, a decent team, but the landscape was limited: an enthusiastic culture, but the same races every year, and it wasn’t competitive enough. He wasn’t getting any younger and whatever he was winning was being eaten by utility bills. Time to shoot for the moon.

  When he got back to Europe he found that things had changed, changed utterly.

  ‘In 1994, everything was completely changed. The increase in speed was incredible. Especially in the mountains. In 1988, I had been as good as some of the best. On the climbs, I could stay in the top ten. On the 1988 Tour de Suisse, I was at the summit with the Dutchman Gert-Jan Theunisse and Steven Rooks, the best climbers of the Tour de France three weeks later. And now, though I knew I had made progress, I couldn’t keep up.

  ‘They didn’t use the same gears as before. No one put on the little brackets any more. All that had disappeared in five years. Incredible, the level had gone through the ceiling. I understood pretty fast that I was going to have to face something. I had heard EPO talked about, the word had made its way to the United States. We knew that it doped the blood, increasing the oxygen capacity, but I never thought that it could have changed things so much.

  ‘At Motorola, some of the old guys were a little demoralised. For example, in a race at the beginning of the season like Tirreno–Adriatico [an Italian stage race held at the beginning of March], we spent a week racing full force, only to survive. Just to finish the race. It was completely crazy.’

  Competition was counterfeit. This was a pharmaceutical trade with a sports theme. The teams that used EPO were stronger than those that didn’t. Full stop. And the authorities didn’t seem to mind. You joined the arms race or you got out. Those who used the most, those who doped to the edge, dominated the races.

  One of Stephen Swart’s teammates now in Europe was an impatient young American called Lance Armstrong. He’d become world champion the previous season. The class of the team. Their paths had crossed on the American circuit not twelve months previously. Stephen told the story of how Lance came to win the Thrift Drug Triple Crown of Cycling. Back in 1993, an elbow of the US season was a three-race series in the eastern states. Three races: the Thrift Drug classic in Pittsburgh, the K-Mart West Virginia classic and the Philadelphia CoreStates Championship.

  Three races and the prize on offer for the overall winner of the Thrift Drug Crown of Cycling was $1 million.

  Lance was the hotshot of the field. After Pittsburgh, where Lance showed his dominance as a one-day racer, the series continued on through West Virginia. Lance proceeded to boss the five-day stage race. Before the end, Stephen Swart’s Coors Light team were approached with an offer.

  The contact, as far as he could remember, came from Frankie Andreu of Motorola through Scott McKinley of Coors. The offer was simple. Don’t attack and there’ll be a $50,000 kickback. A discussion took place on the road as they cycled and, afterwards, they held a meeting in Lance Armstrong’s and Phil Anderson’s hotel room. Lance was the kid; Anderson the old Aussie gunslinger who’d slugged it out with Bernard Hinault at the 1981 Tour.

  Stephen didn’t feel he had it in him to challenge Armstrong anyway. If anybody else did they didn’t say so. Not McKinley. Not Mike Engelman, their big-name guy. Nobody. And $50,000 for mislaying their aggression would make for a nice little bonus.

  So they just played along accordingly. In the race Lance was leading, and Coors’ Mike Engelman and a guy called Steve Hegg were the only riders with the remote chance of a challenge. Lance Armstrong led them home for the second leg of the Triple Crown. And in Philadelphia he wrapped it up. The Coors Light boys were unclear as to whether the entente cordial was supposed to continue in the city of brotherly love, but Armstrong made it irrelevant by being untouchable.

  A few weeks later the contents of an envelope containing $50,000 in cash was divided among the Coors Light boys. Nobody was any the wiser.36

  Swart was there and Armstrong was there on one of the watershed days for doping, the day in 1994 when the Michele Ferrari-doped Italian team Gewiss-Ballan came home one-two-three in the Flèche Wallonne.

  From the start of the season they’d been exceptionally strong but now they were flaunting it. Now Ferrari was advertising his programme in a way that made everybody else take notice. And if anyone was still so blind as not to see, Ferrari casually equated EPO to orange juice the next day. He didn’t say the Gewiss cyclists used EPO, but he went as close as he could. EPO briefly emerged from the shadows, introduced itself to the world at large, and retreated again with the words, ‘You know where to find me.’

  At the time, EPO had been banned for three years by the UCI but, while there was no test capable of detecting its presence in the urine, this performance enh
ancer was all the rage. It was open season.

  One rider who sat up and took good note of what was going on was Lance Armstrong, who was wearing his rainbow jersey as world champion that day. Armstrong was in good shape and he was hungry. He drove himself furiously, trying to catch the three breakaways, but just couldn’t reach his prey. He was one of the big losers that day. And it being Lance, he felt cheated, not defeated.

  A year later, in March of 1995, after the Milan–San Remo race, Stephen went to Como where a number of the Motorola team were living, including Lance, Frankie Andreu, Kevin Livingston and George Hincapie. Team doctor Max Testa lived nearby as well.

  The day after the race, the Motorola boys hit the roads for a recovery ride, just a simple stretch and pedal down the road. No pressure or intensity, just for a couple of hours turning the pedals while shooting the breeze.

  One of the topics of the day was EPO and how, after the pastings they had taken the previous season, the team was still riding at such a disadvantage to the European teams. As professionals they felt they would have to look seriously at how to rectify the problem. Or else they’d all be home competing before ten people on lonely roads in West Virginia.

  It was a freewheeling conversation in all senses. They’d break into different pairings as they rode and talk about it. They were mostly young Americans who had grown up in a different cycling culture to Europeans. Guys who never thought doping would be part of the deal. As a New Zealander, Swart could see that. Lance Armstrong agreed that this wasn’t what he’d got into the sport for, but at the end of the day you had to step up.

  He told the team that if they were going to go to the Tour they were going to have to produce. Armstrong didn’t spell out explicitly what he intended to do or when he was going to start doing it. There were no rocket scientists on the ride that day but they all worked out what he meant.

  Feeling he should commit to Armstrong’s philosophy (i.e., if you aren’t doped you aren’t committed), Swart went about getting himself EPO. Like Frankie Andreu and others in the team who didn’t have access to paid Italian consultants, he went to a chemist in Switzerland and bought some EPO over the counter.

  The Tour de Suisse, approximately three weeks before the start of the Tour de France, was his testing ground. He used EPO throughout the Tour of Switzerland and couldn’t stop worrying about what he’d got into. Whatever extra energy came with the increase in red cells was drained by the stress of his leap into the darkness.

  ‘I can’t remember how long the box of EPO lasted, but I basically took it every second day. Then in the race I was just going backwards. Then at the Tour de France the EPO ran out after the prologue and at that point I just decided it wasn’t for me.’

  That was it essentially. He recalled the team doing internal tests to measure their haematocrits as the race hit the mountains. The machine could process ten samples at once so everybody got tested. The numbers were called out like a lotto. Stephen was around 46, 47, which in the brave new world was sort of lamentable. Pretty much everybody else including Lance was 50 or above. He tells this as if unsure whether he was witnessing the death of sport or he just didn’t have what it took to be a proper doper. He got through the Tour, made it to Paris but without truly competing with those benefiting from EPO.

  There is sadness, that’s for sure. On a mantelpiece sits a photograph from the Champs-Élysées at the end of the 1995 Tour de France. It shows the five Motorola riders that finished that year, not just lucky to have made it but, remembering the tragedy of their teammate Fabio Casartelli who crashed on a descent that year and died, lucky to be alive. Sitting on the handlebars of Lance’s bike in that picture is Stephen and Jan’s daughter, the then four-year-old Olivia.

  The photo is the only evidence in the room that Stephen was once a racer. He doesn’t see there’s much to boast about. He was part of a world where your sport told you to cheat or get screwed. He didn’t want to cheat; he didn’t want to get screwed and he ended up in a kind of halfway house, unclean and still screwed.

  Listening now as he recalls the Motorola years, the team haematocrit tests and Lance scoring one of the big numbers, my mind goes back to another sofa, the one in the lobby of Hotel La Fauvelaie in eastern France two and a half years before. There I asked Lance Armstrong about these same two Motorola years.

  ‘When did you become aware of the doping subculture?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer because Motorola was white as snow and I was there all the way through ninety-six.’

  ‘How conscious were you that EPO had become a factor in race results?’

  ‘We didn’t think about it. It wasn’t an issue for us. It wasn’t an option. Jim Ochowicz ran the programme that he set out to run, a clean programme.’

  Armstrong gave one version, Swart offered another. Black and white. I thought about Swart’s motivation. He had retired six years previously, returning from Europe with his family to begin a new life in New Zealand. It’d been a good while since. He started a new career as a builder and small-time developer, and he’d raised his family in one of the better cities. Why would he go back to his career to lie about it, especially to tell stuff that hurts him and his family? Why bring this on them?

  He did so because professional cycling shouldn’t have been like that, and it mustn’t be like this for the next generation.

  I’ve listened to these two accounts of the Motorola years and know it is Swart who doesn’t lie.

  Deepening the conviction that he’s telling the truth is the matter-of-fact way Stephen Swart describes his own use of EPO. He was never going to be the poster boy for the drug. Despite having bought and then used EPO through the Tour de Suisse and at the beginning of the 1995 Tour de France, he hadn’t blossomed as promised. The duck didn’t become a swan. In fact, he had raced better the previous year when he wasn’t using EPO.

  He’d struggled on, though. Three weeks. His entire season came down to a merciless fight to survive Le Tour and fight through another season. One more summer with the circus. At the end of the ’95 Tour he was still pedalling, and he actually enjoyed that mad final day and the colour and fun of arriving on the Champs-Élysées. He hadn’t won, of course, but being there at the end was victory in itself. It told his employers that he was still strong and healthy and good to go for another year.

  The evening the race finished, Motorola organised a small party for the cyclists, their immediate families, and the team’s technical staff. It was a congenial atmosphere, but there was always the sense that elsewhere in Paris there were more substantial celebrations going on.

  Swart and Steve Bauer were both warmly congratulated for their selfless contribution to the team effort. It brought a smile to Stephen’s face. This recognition was a good sign. If he and Jan still had doubts about the renewal of his contract, they were being swept away now by the gratitude that the team showed him that evening.

  After the Tour, the cyclists rested up for a week, then prepared for the end-of-season races. First, in August, for the Leeds classic in England, and the Grand Prix of Zurich, then for the Vuelta a España that started in September. The day before Zurich, Jim Ochowicz asked Stephen to come to his room. Out of the blue Ochowicz told him that his contract would not be renewed in 1996.

  ‘It was completely unexpected. We should have discussed it during the Tour de France, but we hadn’t, so I presumed everything was okay. Jim asked me to come to his room and told me that there was nothing for me. It’s like saying to me, “There’s a plane that’s leaving in two hours, and since you’re not racing tomorrow, we reserved you a seat on it.” I tried to come to terms with it, and could have started looking for another team, but I thought: “No, that’s enough. I don’t want to keep going in this direction.” I didn’t want to go on with Motorola. I could have maybe started again with another team, but I wasn’t interested.’

  Swart went around to the rooms to say goodbye to his teammates. They already knew. He particularly wanted to shake hands with Sean
Yates and Frankie Andreu, who he thought were decent guys.

  ‘I tried to keep my head high and remain proud. I said, “Good luck, see you around sometime.” ’

  Stephen knew the politics of the team well enough to suspect that Ochowicz had discussed his situation with Armstrong but he wanted to say goodbye to him anyway.

  ‘I knocked on his door. It was open and I went in. I saw that he was in the bathroom. I called out that I had come to say goodbye to him.’ He just stuck his hand outside the door.

  ‘ “See you around.”

  ‘ “Yeah, see you around.”

  ‘He didn’t say, “Hang on a minute.” He didn’t try to take leave of me properly. I understood then that he had been a part of the decision and he didn’t have the guts to look me in the face.’

  The manner of the goodbye added another twist of sadness. Swart believed that Armstrong had greatness in him and has said that if doping didn’t exist the Texan would still have been a champion. Still, it saddened him to see such smallness in a man who might have been great.

  ‘When he had his cancer, I thought he would have the opportunity to say in front of the world: “I made a mistake.” If that had been the case and he had gotten back to a good level, I would see him in a different light. He had the chance to do something positive for the sport; instead of that, he helped keep things the same as they were before his illness. Since the scandal of 1998, what has changed?

  ‘Nothing. The doping culture has just become more sophisticated. I think he is fooling these people, the cancer survivors. He has become a spokesman for them, but his past is troubled. Of course, he was a cancer victim, but you can’t help but ask yourself if he contributed to its development. Personally, I have more respect for a cyclist like the Swiss Alex Zülle who at least raised his hand and confessed, “I did it. I’m sorry.” Lance had the chance to be honest. By being cured of cancer, he could have, in a small way, helped the sport, and he chose not to do it.’